Hello Travelers, For todays patch we have a bunch of fixes for controller, UI, skills, and more. Were also spending a moment to comment on Dive Bomb and Ghostflame. Read below for the full notes.

BUG FIXES

QUEST

• Fixed an issue where players would get the Immortal Empire quest before gaining access to that quest state of Elder Gaspar
• Fixed an issue that caused the elevator to the Council Chambers to never appear after defeating waves of monsters at the end of the Void Assault quest

CONTROLLER

• Fixed issues with interacting (such as opening a chest, or talking to an NPC) while using a controller
• Fixed an issue with mapping the Y/Triangle controller button
• Fixed issue with controller bindings disappearing when using a mouse
• Controller binding dialog can be closed by pressing the B / Circle button
• Navigation cursor refocuses the corresponding action binding button after an action is bound

UI

• Fixed an issue where once a party member enters the arena and you do NOT enter the arena, you cannot open any UI
• Fixed an issue so that Steam Required and License Required are separate errors
• Fixed issue where some enemies had no/only partial red outlines when hovered
• Fixed an issue where item tooltips displayed when the mouse was not hovering them
• Fixed issue causing no characters found to be overlaid on your character list at character selection
• Fixed inconsistent portraits for Maceth and Leyda

SKILLS

• Fixed a bug where Elemental Novas damaging area was not affected by increases to its area of effect
• Fixed issue where when returning to human form after transforming turns, the player model invisible
• Fixed most instances of a bug where channeled movement skills, particularly Flame Rush and Shield Rush, could lock the player into the movement and not visually move the player until the ability ended

OTHER

• Slightly Improved party transition times
• Fixed a visual gap in Festering Sewers
• Fixed weird visual triangles at top of screen in The Ancient Cavern
• Fixed issue with players dying prematurely by setting their actor to invincible as soon as we spawn them, then allowing grace period to overtake later
• Fixed issue with linking the game guide in chat
• Revert change from previous patch that was causing players to see other players running in place (reverted change was a fix aiming to fix players not animating when joining a scene).

CHANGES

• Require players to manually click to transition scenes during the campaign
• Various Bazaar UI/UX improvements
• Greatly reduced the sell price of Arena Keys and Arena Keys of Memory
  • Arena keys now sell for 175 (from 6500)
  • Arena keys now sell for 175 gold (from 6500)
  • Arena keys of memory now sell for 265 gold (from 7250)
  • This was done to remove the burden of optimal on MG players feeling like they needed to level up CoF and use arena key prophecies to farm gold effectively
• Added Prevention for CoF bonuses from doubling XP tome rewards in Monoliths
  • This is also technically a bug fix as the XP Tome Reward isn't a direct item reward. Item Factions are not intended to have an effect on experience gains, only how items are obtained.

GHOSTFLAME AND DIVE BOMB

Theres one change in this patch, and another change well be releasing soon which we wanted to speak a little bit more to than just listing. These are changes to Ghostflames Spirit Kindling Node (included in this patch), and Dive Bombs Cloud Gatherer node (being released in near future).

CHANGES

Ghostflame

• Fixed a bug where Ghostflames Spirit Kindling could apply to the player if it had previously hit a Wraith during its lifetime and was not currently hitting a Wraith

Dive Bomb (hotfix soon)

• Changed Cloud Gatherer to only apply to any individual Smoke Bomb one time.

Both of these nodes are exceptionally overperforming, but thats not why were changing them right now. Were changing them because of the performance impact these skills are causing, more specifically their tendency to crash servers. Our current stance is that we wont issue mid-cycle changes for balance, such as with Profane Veils Vampiric Blood node. While the node is much stronger than intended, its not causing performance issues and so it will instead be changed with the next cycle patch. This stance is of course open to feedback, its not carved in stone. If theres high demand to fix bugs or make changes that affect balance mid-cycle, we can adjust. While these changes are being made for performance reasons, they do also carry considerable impact to power levels of these skills/nodes. This automatically raises some questions, to which weve provided a short QA below of what we think are the biggest questions. [olist]

Will existing entries be removed from the leaderboards? The answer to this is no, we will not be removing current entries from the leaderboards. We understand this choice does have the negative effect of affecting some players motivation to push the leaderboards when theres a leader. However, theres many other negative effects if we do remove entries. Primarily, if we remove rankings in these situations, it incentivizes players to keep these interactions a secret until the very end of the cycle, making it much more difficult for us to act in time for the next cycle.

Dive Bombs Cloud Gatherer has been known and used since release, why are you only changing it now? We were willing to live with the node being imbalanced, but it wasnt until later that we realized players were maintaining Smoke Bombs in Echo of a World as they ran echoes, which means as more and more Smoke Bombs piled up, the server becomes more unstable and eventually crashes. Were only fixing this mid-cycle due to the server issues it presents, not its balance.

Why not fix it in a way that keeps it as powerful as it currently is, but without the server issues? Investigating a skill for appropriate balance changes thats not purely numerical takes a fair amount of time. From design discussions, to implementation, to QA, and finally merge and release. For cases like this, it unfortunately taking this time means it comes at the cost of time spent towards other bugs, or new content, when we only plan to remove it as soon as the next cycle starts. [/olist]

[ 2024-03-06 17:03:13 CET ] [ Original post ]